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The best part of waking up is internet ranting in your cup

I’m a night owl by nature. Left to my own devices, I’d go to bed at 4am and wake up at noon. Sadly, employment and parenthood mean that’s not an option. (Not that employment and parenthood are sad. You know what I mean.) So to get my nocturnal brain kicked into gear in the morning, I check Twitter. I usually find something that’ll wake me right up.

“Pro-lifers should support sex ed… but pro-lifers aren’t welcome in our sex ed club!” http://t.co/ULFEvDTOPN #prolife #prochoice #catch22

— secularprolife (@secularprolife) March 11, 2014

Like this.

Better than coffee! (Full disclosure: I hate coffee.)

From a philosophical point of view, I get why this happens. I understand why pro-choicers see both birth control and abortion as questions of being able to control one’s own body, even though I think they’re wrong to dismiss the obvious difference between the two. And I understand why people who oppose birth control think that acceptance of contraception inevitably leads to acceptance of abortion, even though I think they’re wildly mistaken. In both cases, though, I just want to ask why they’re so sure that theirs is the only viewpoint that reasonable [birth control|pro-life] advocates could hold.

I also understand it from a practical point of view. Birth control is far more widely accepted than abortion. So if you want people to reject birth control or accept abortion, it’s in your interest to link the two. You might even get really protective of the idea that they have to be linked. But most people don’t see them as the same. So groups like All Our Lives and Secular Pro-Life will just keep on reaching out to those people, and advocating for family planning freedom as one component of our work against abortion.

1 thought on “The best part of waking up is internet ranting in your cup”

  1. I think both sides are inconsistent when opposing or defending BOTH contraception and abortion. If you oppose abortion because you think that conception is the beginning of human life, you can’t oppose contraception, because it doesn’t kill anybody. If you defend abortion as just another family planning method, you can’t explain why the abortion rate should be reduced, as stated in slogans like “legal, safe and rare” or “contraceptives for not having abortions” (a prochoice slogan very usual in my country, Argentina). We pro-lifers supporting contraception do so because it is a basic human right, it empowers women to make choices about motherhood WHITOUT taking any human life.

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